Long Arm of the Lwa

It's 11 o'clock on a Saturday night, and I’m lost in Queens on my way to a Vodou ceremony. Three Haitian drummers sit in my car, their instruments lying in my trunk. The party can't start without us, and we're two hours late. 

"I speak enough Creole to know if you try to blame this on the blan," I say, using the Creole word for "white."

It's probably not true, but it gets a laugh. And it helps convince one of the drummers, who goes by his stage name Neg Mawon, to type the address into my GPS. In a few minutes, we roll up to a quiet house on a sleepy street near the airport. But the drummers unload their equipment, and I know things won’t be quiet for long. Soon, the spirits will be here, and they’re going to cause a racket. ------ Sixteen hours before he beats a drum, Deenps Bazile begins his workday lounging in the barbecue area at Jacob Riis Park, a pretty and underpopulated strip of sand in the Rockaways.  Bazile, who prefers to be called Gran Bwa—also the name of the Vodou spirit of the forest—arrives early to reserve a small, wooded corner of the park for a rare daytime ceremony to honor Agwe, the spirit who rules the sea. Gran Bwa is tired, he says, not from a late night or an early morning, but from being spiritually possessed a full week earlier by Kadja Bossou, a forceful, bull-like spirit.

The spirit is said to “mount” a person’s head during Vodou possessions (practitioners and researchers usually prefer the Creole spelling to the anglicized “Voodoo,” which carries with it negative connotations ranging from bad zombie movies to the George H.W. Bush-coined phrase “voodoo economics”). The mounted person, called the “horse,” is said to be controlled by the spirit and to have no memory of the possession once it is over.

“Each person receives the spirits differently,” Gran Bwa says, struggling to stay awake in his Tommy Bahama beach chair. “When Kadja Bossou comes to me, he’s very rough.”

Gran Bwa estimates that he knows 20 houngans and mambos—Vodou priests and priestesses—in New York who have their own peristyles, or temples, mostly in Brooklyn basements. But he isn’t among them. Like his namesake, Gran Bwa prefers to work out in the open.

“It’s more spiritual to me to do it outside,” he says. “You find the woods, the air, the water.”

Over time, Gran Bwa has turned a corner of Prospect Park into an open-air temple of sorts. In the 1980s, a few years after he moved to New York from Haiti, he began making spiritual carvings in trees in a part of the park’s southeast corner. Haitians now know the spot as “Lakou Gran Bwa” (“lakou” is Creole for “courtyard”) and gather there to play dominos, talk Haitian politics and drum.

“It’s like therapy for them,” he says. Gran Bwa has faced plenty of resistance, both from police who didn’t like him carving up trees and from people who simply don’t like Vodou. He says people twice tried to set fire to his masterwork, a large tree trunk carved in the likeness of the spirit Gran Bwa, and that one person was arrested trying to demolish it with a hammer. Eventually, Gran Bwa says, the tree was so damaged that it succumbed to the weather. “I think the statue is destroyed, but not the sprit, because the sprit is still in our heart.”

Gran Bwa and other Vodou practitioners aren’t naive about mainstream perceptions of their religion. Many Americans don’t even realize Vodou is a religion at all, instead associating it only with evil sorcery.

American ideas of Vodou were largely formulated during the U.S. military occupation of Haiti early in the last century, a time when it wasn’t yet considered terribly impolite to cast a nation of dark-skinned people as ignorant, superstitious heathens. People who haven’t studied or practiced the religion are likely to be familiar only with its most salacious aspects—tales of zombies risen from the dead and evil witch doctors ready to unleash merciless spirits on innocents for the right price.

“When I meet people and I say I do Vodou, most of them say, oh you do bad stuff,” says Sirenedantor Sainvil, a mambo who lives in Canarsie and has come to the beach for the Agwe ceremony. “But when I explain to them what Vodou is, they’re interested to learn more.”

While a belief in magic is central to Vodou, Sainvil argues that’s essentially the case for any religion.

“Everything in life is magic,” she says.

“For example, Moses in the Bible: He was doing magic. A pastor, he put his hand on your head, and he say the spirit come to you. What is this? Everything is magic.”

Vodou certainly allows for magical spells, called wanga, to be cast. But most of the religion focuses on the service of a large pantheon of spirits. The Rada class of spirits, mostly brought to Haiti by African slaves, are seen as the “coolest” and easiest to work with. Petwo spirits, largely New World creations, are “hotter” and more temperamental. The Gede are the boisterous, ribald dead, known for their love of penis jokes and rum infused with 21 hot peppers.

Some of these spirits have made their way into other religious traditions with African roots, such as Santeria and the Hoodoo of the American South, under identical or similar names. In particular, Legba—the guardian of the crossroads that separates the spirit world from the physical world—and the warrior spirit Ogou, pop up in some form in various faiths.

Vodou survived in part due to the cleverness of Haitian slaves, who syncretized their spirits to the Catholic saints of their French masters. Kouzen Zaka, a peasant farmer spirit, is associated with St. Isidore, a patron saint to farmers. Damballah, a serpentine spirit of wisdom, matches up with St. Patrick due to his association with snakes. Agwe, the guest of honor at the beach party, is sometimes seen as St. Ulrique, who holds a fish in a popular chromolithograph.

Many Vodou practitioners are also Catholics, but Gran Bwa is not, and he says Haitian slaves were only “bluffing” their masters into thinking they were. “I do not go with the saint,” Gran Bwa explains. “Kouzen is Kouzen. Ogou is Ogou. Lwa is Lwa.”

Serving the spirits is seen as a mutually beneficial arrangement. The spirits get attention and the food and drink offerings they crave, and the serviteurs get protection and help in their daily lives.

Like Gran Bwa, Sainvil doesn’t have a temple in her home, but she performs divinatory readings there with playing cards about four or five times a week. And she keeps an altar in her bedroom, dedicated mostly to Ezili Danto—a Petwo spirit—and to the Gede.

When she wakes up in the morning, Sainvil ties her hair in different colored scarves depending on the day, lights a candle for the spirits, and prays to them. For Ezili Danto, she keeps the perfumes and colognes the spirit prefers—Florida Water and Rve d’Or—as well as more expensive scents like Jean Paul Gaultier. For the Gede, she keeps the hot pepper-infused rum, a cross and a fake skull.

When she comes home from work, Sainvil lights the candle again and pours

three libations of rum on the floor to thank the spirits for the day.

“If you do Vodou the right way, you live your life longer, healthy,” she says. “You have happiness, love. For me, Vodou is, I have to respect you for you to respect me. I have to love you for you to love me. That’s Vodou.”

Practitioners say Vodou is thriving in New York. Neg Mawon, who eventually shows up to the Agwe ceremony with burgers and a Smokey Joe grill, says he knows more than 300 houngans and mambos in the city. Gran Bwa runs one of several shops in Flatbush that sell Vodou supplies. Sainvil says there are probably 30 people in the city who perform kanzo ceremonies, the rites through which someone becomes initiated as clergy.

“The spirit is everywhere,” she says. “The spirit doesn’t take no car, no airplane. The spirit is with you, everywhere you go.”

Still, serving the spirits in New York has its challenges. Vodou temples in Haiti can be large enough to accommodate hundreds of dancers, while in New York practitioners are usually crammed into small basements. Neighbors sometimes call the police complaining about drum noise. And sacrificing animals to the spirits presents its own problems.

“When you’re doing a Gede party in Haiti, you have to buy the goat and let the spirit come to sacrifice the goat,” Sainvil says. “But here, you have to go to where you buy the goat and pray, and then they kill the goat. You cannot do it in your basement. They will arrest you.”

Even today, at the beach, compromises must be made. At an Agwe ceremony in Haiti, practitioners would sink a raft with his offerings in the ocean, but Gran Bwa and Neg Mawon don’t have a permit to do that in New York. Instead, they set up an offering table near the beach with fruits, fresh flowers, a cooked fish for Agwe and items sacred to the sprits, such as a mirror for Agwe’s wife Lasiren.

“Even if you’re not putting it to the sea, you’re still offering it to the spirit, because it’s in your heart,” Gran Bwa says.

In front of the table, another houngan sifts cornmeal through his fingers to create Agwe’s veve, a ritual drawing. As everyone sings and dances and pours out offerings of water and alcohol to the spirits, the ephemeral shape of a boat will slowly become unrecognizable.

Drummers beat out sacred rhythms, people dance and songs are sung to Legba, the guardian of the crossroads that separates the spirit world from the physical world; to the Marasa, the sacred twins; to Damballah, the spirit associated with St. Patrick.

Eventually, it is time to salute Agwe. None of the other spirits have come yet, but this is his party, and he shows up forcefully in Gran Bwa, spinning the houngan in a whirlwind circle. A low chair is brought out for the spirit, and he sits in it backward, pantomiming rowing as though he is in a boat. He hops around the sand, holding on to the chair, insisting on greeting everyone with his special handshake, crossing his arms and gripping the other person’s pinkies with his index fingers.

Agwe doesn’t speak. Instead, he repeatedly shouts a single syllable that sounds like the word, “Cough!” But somehow he’s able to make his requests known, and soon the houngans and mambos are dumping seawater and Agwe’s fruit offerings into a basin at his direction.

Using his divine knowledge, Agwe mixes up a good-luck bath, and everyone stands in line to have their arms and legs rubbed down with the briny, fruity water.

When the baths are done, the spirit turns the bucket over into the sand, and Gran Bwa’s body falls out of the chair, seemingly losing the spirit. But, like the end of a horror movie, the spirit jumps up with one last burst of energy before Gran Bwa is allowed to rest. ------ It takes nearly three hours after things wrap up at Riis Park before we arrive at the next ceremony. The interim is filled with lost addresses, missing drummers, a couple slices of pizza and plenty of Red Bull. Then, suddenly, Gran Bwa, Neg Mawon and another drummer pile their instruments into my car. I’m not entirely sure how I ended up chauffeur, but I don’t mind. The only reason I’m going to be allowed in is because Gran Bwa and Neg Mawon have arranged for me to be invited. These basement ceremonies happen nearly every weekend at one house or another, but you’re not going to find them by typing “Vodou temple” into Google Maps.

I help them carry their drums into the house, and we duck into a tiny basement with low ceilings, where four mambos have been waiting with a couple dozen congregants. The mambos wear elaborately embroidered white dresses and stand before an altar heavy with fruit, cakes, liquors, candles and perfumes, framed by colorful scarves and blinking Christmas lights. The poto mitan—the center pole through which the spirits are thought to enter the room—appears to be a water pipe wrapped in paper party streamers.

The altar is dedicated to Ezili Danto and her sister, Ezili Freda. Freda is seen as white or light-skinned, a woman of luxury. Notoriously capricious and difficult to please, she is often associated with the Catholic image of the bejeweled Mater Dolorosa. Danto is black, a poor single mother with two scars on her cheek, often tied to an image of a black Madonna.

One man is going to marry both of them tonight.

The vibe here is slightly different from the ceremony earlier in the day. At the beach, curious onlookers bobbed their head to the drums, probably not even knowing they were watching salutes to Vodou spirits. At least half a dozen white people, who met Neg Mawon when he drummed for their dance class, came as guests.

But here, Neg Mawon and Gran Bwa are hired hands, not clergy. I receive a warm enough welcome, but I’m probably the only white person who knows the ceremony is even happening. Pictures are not allowed.

“I don’t want to be filmed, because I go to Catholic church,” explains the woman sitting next to me. While many Vodou practitioners are also Catholics, it’s not a fact the church is happy about.

The same rituals from earlier in the day are followed. The drums are beaten, and the sacred songs are sung in order. The ceremonial order varies slightly from house to house, but it doesn’t change depending on which spirits are being celebrated. Even though the whole party is for Freda and Danto, they still have to wait their turn.

The first spirit to show up is Damballah.

------

Eventually, it is time to salute Agwe. None of the other spirits have come yet, but this is his party, and he shows up forcefully in Gran Bwa, spinning the houngan in a whirlwind circle. ------

He takes ahold of one of the mambos, and she drops to the floor. Her arms extend out in front of her, streamlining her body like that of a snake. The mambo’s body is covered in a white sheet, and then Damballah slithers around the basement floor, eventually crawling under the altar table to look for the raw egg and flour that are his traditional offering.

The other mambos instruct the drummers to stop, and the possessed mambo wakes up from her trance. She yells at the others, thinking they’ve placed her under the table as a joke, and everybody laughs.

Next, Agwe makes his second appearance of the day, showing up in the body of another mambo. This Agwe is remarkably similar to the Agwe I met earlier in the day—the backward chair, the rowing, the muteness except for that “cough!” sound. Spiritual possessions aren’t a time for practitioners to express themselves, but instead to give themselves up to the spirits.

A little later, this same mambo begins to lurch as she sings the songs for Freda. She composes herself and continues, but it happens again, and then Freda is here, in the mambo’s body. She begins paying special attention to her betrothed, and the two disappear into a back room.

People marry the spirits for different reasons, but it’s usually to help sort out some sort of problem in the person’s life. Typically, the person getting married must pay for the ceremony, including rings, and refrain from sex one day each week that is reserved for the spirit.

When the bridal couple emerges again, Freda is wearing a pink dress. The two sit in front of the altar, and a man serving as the priest performs a short ceremony, drawn out a bit by Freda playing coy about whether she’ll really go through with it.

Finally, the spirit accepts the marriage, and everybody applauds in approval. Champagne and cake are passed out. For people in the presence of a divinity, the crowd is remarkably nonchalant, chatting with one another and paying attention to practical concerns like the dwindling supply of Dewar’s or Budweiser. The scene in front of them is marvelous, surreal, but it’s also routine.

Before she leaves, Freda asks for me. I dutifully come, and she brings my face to hers and kisses the air in front of my lips, then nuzzles up to me. The congregation roars, but Freda’s new husband is scandalized. I try to turn her attention back to him. “Mari ou isit la!” I say in my best Creole. It means, “Your husband is right here!” Freda rubs Pompeia, her traditional perfume, all over my hands, and my nostrils fill with the sweet, soapy scent. She gestures to the altar and instructs me to take anything I want. Worried she’ll start making demands on me if I stick around too long—perhaps a marriage of my own?—I escape with a handful of grapes and hurry to my seat.

Once Freda leaves, more salutes are done for spirits who won’t show up this evening, until we reach the part when Danto is supposed to come receive her husband. She is saluted with Florida Water, a cha-cha rattle, two daggers and a black candle that sets off the smoke alarm.

The same mambo who was possessed by Freda begins to twirl in circles, nearly falling several times. I know for sure that Danto has arrived because she begins screaming. She takes a man by the elbow, and he hands her the daggers. She holds them points-out, shouting, as if looking for someone to stab. She pumps the knives wildly, perhaps a little dangerously.

“You see the difference between the two of them?” says the woman sitting next to me. “The black one doesn’t fool around.”

The groom is presented to Danto, and she shouts, but no words come out. All she can say is, “Ke! Ke! Ke!” Gran Bwa says he’s able to translate this.

Apparently, Danto is telling her groom that if he wrongs her, she will make him impotent.

They disappear into the back room to change clothes, and by the time they come back for their wedding—well after 3 a.m.—I’m nearly too tired to follow what’s happening. But Neg Mawon has arranged for me to sign the marriage certificate as the couple’s best man, and so I’m thrust to the front of the room, watching the priest anoint the rings with Florida Water before the couple exchanges them. The spicy, citrus-laced smell of the cologne fills the room.

It’s pushing 4 a.m. by the time I sign the marriage certificate, and I’m fading and worried about driving home. As I say my goodbyes, I wonder what else is going on in basements across the city, what other sorts of phantasmagoria people don’t want their church friends to know about.

“I’m sure there’s a lot of people in the church doing what I’m doing, but they keep it undercover,” the woman next to me says. “When I go to church, it’s my church time. I come here now, it’s like I come to a good party.

“God is up there,” she continues, pointing to the sky. “But the spirits are here on earth. I need somebody on earth to shelter me.”

-- Calvin Hennick is writing a novel about Haitian Vodou. He can be reached at  [calvinhennick@yahoo.com](mailto:calvinhennick@yahoo.com).